There are three French Sutta projects in Bilara, and I am not sure on which one you are working. Sutta translation should normally be quite distinct from blurb translation.
Nevermind, Ayya, I was misunderstanding the structure of the data. I looked at what it’s supposed to look like on Suttacentral and all is well, sorry for the bother!
Work is underway on the AN French blurbs. Just want to confirm whether I can use my regular French multilingual keyboard to input accented characters (in French) for blurbs or whether I need to switch to a Unicode keyboard and enter each accented character manually using the hex code.
The characters in all Bilara files have to be unicode characters. But the question is how to produce them. I don’t know what your keyboard produces. I think @carmi may have some tipps for the easiest ways to do it, depending on the operating system.
I use a Linux system, where it is easy to type diacritical characters using a compose key.
I would be shocked if in 2023 there was any computer keyboard layout for typing French that didn’t use Unicode.
I mean, if you type anything into Bilara and it looks correct, then it must be Unicode, right?
In any case, if you type the character into this tool and it shows the unicode character you would expect, then you should be good, I think. https://unicode.scarfboy.com/
Well, there are a few keys that are not unicodes such ', - and ... amond just a few others. For that reason, I created a new keyboard layout which includes them, along other useful special characters, punctuation marks, and all the Pali diacritics. I am happy to share my keyboard layout, however it is based and the Swiss-French layout.
Well, technically those are unicode characters, just not the correct unicode characters for the texts on SuttaCentral. For my own use, I have created an AHK script that creates shortcuts for those. I think that most word processors have the feature to be able to auto-convert those. It’s kind of surprising that the Bilara dev(a)s haven’t added those into some kind of auto correct.
I think this has been discussed, and the reason why it wasn’t done is that some of these things are handled very differently in different languages. So there’s no simple standard to which to convert.
Thank you all for the valuable input. I also suspected that my current keyboard at least mostly outputs Unicode. I’ll do a test using the Ven.'s tool and if I have to learn a few opt-codes for the rest, so be it! Just happy I’m figuring this out now instead of way later.
Some of the blurbs use sanskrit-derived terms like dharma and karma, some the pali-derived terms one usually finds in Theravada. Should I standardize to one or the other for the French translation or leave the discrepancy as-is?
I don’t translate the blurbs always ford for word. They are meant to give a short introduction to the Sutta, and I think it’s even up to you on which aspect of the Sutta you wish to focus. Sometimes also, when there are parallels, Bhante Sujato’s blurbs are different in both cases, and I chose to use the same blurb in all places.
